III. Sound as Media
2. Radio Culture
1. Radio as imagined community (Hilmes)
2. Radio as interface (Fickers)
3. Radio as not radio: sonic social technical communities online (Pinch & Athanasiades)
4. Radio as art (Amacher, Lozano-Hemmer)
Telefunken ad from 1957
Radio as imagined community:
• Benedict Anderson’s description of the modern print-influenced citizen // radio listener
• “Unity, connection, and communication in its purest sense.” (p. 352)
• Simultaneity of experience – without direct contact
• Exposure to the public – in the privacy of one’s home
• “Radio’s ‘immateriality’ allowed it to cross these boundaries: allowed ‘race’ music to invade the white middle-class home, vaudeville to compete with opera in the living room, risqué city humor to raise rural eyebrows, salesmen and entertainers to find a place in the family circle.” (p. 355)
• Radio’s power to unify the nation culturally – what national culture?
»Commercialism»Utopian discourse of uplift and
education»Dystopian fear of the popular»Vast audiences of women»Linguistic unity»Enforcement of cultural norms
Telefunken ads from the 1930s
Radio as interface:
• Mental mapping - the cognitive production of an individualized representation of experience space
• The ether (an imagined space)
• “The magic comes from entering a world of sound and from using that sound to make your own vision, your own dream, your own world.” (Susan Douglas quoted on p. 415)
• “Radioitis”—Schaudenken
• Emergence of a European radio infrastructure:
• Union International de Radiodiffusion/International Broadcasting Union (UIR/IBU) was formed in 1925
• IBU’s “ether police” (permanent Technical Center)
• The use of the frequency meter and calibrated station scale – the materialization of a regulatory regime (p.421)
• Superheterodyne circuit (“superhets” or “super”)
• Valundia system and Auto-Skala
• “Station scales, then, served as early atlases of globalization, and one may interpret the use of radio in the 1920s and 1930s as a symbolic appropriation of the European broadcasting landscape.” (p. 432)
Telefunken ad from 1969
Radio as not-radio (sonic technosocial communities online):
• An ethnographic study of ACIDplanet.com
• ACID turns the computer into a recording studio and enables users to make music, post/share, and review each other’s music
• Review system (comments and star-rating;
a “translation mode”) and contests (remixes and mash-ups)
• Users: provide most of the content, form a devoted community; more organic than regular file-sharing systems
• Public interaction – visible to all users
• Special sociotechnical instruments / scopic focusing technologies: allow users to focus on certain selected pieces of content
• Double sociality – economies of reputation
• Transduction
• New and old identities and systems - possibilities, problems, and contradictions
Comparative Analysis
In small groups, examine and discuss two online sites:
www.acidplanet.com
www.bbc.co.uk/radio
Consider these online spaces in relationship to the following ideas and issues from our study of radio culture:
• What kinds of communities do these sites create and foster?
• What kinds of mental mapping do their interfaces reflect?
• What kinds of identities and reputations do they produce for their users?
Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9 (2003)by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
November 2012 – February 2013, SFMOMAPart of 2012 ZERO1 Biennial
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